There is tension in the air, I can sense it. I can taste it. What was supposed to be a year of slow but stable growth has turned into a potential nightmare for dealers, automakers, and customers. Tension craves release, and if it can’t be quietly dissipated, it’s going to result in conflict. That’s just the way it is. The big conflict of the moment is the long-simmering showdown between dealers, as represented by the National Automobile Dealers Association, and automakers, as represented by the Alliance for Automotive Innovation.
Today, The Morning Dump goes to war. Not as a combatant, but as an observer. An embedded journalist. Ernie Pyle or, maybe, Evan Wright. War is a pretty heavy subject, so I’m going to couch this all in the philosophical observations of Monty Python. I’ll start with the ‘holy war’ between dealers and automakers, because it’s a big deal and could have an impact on consumers.
Why is this all happening now? There are two wars going on simultaneously. There’s a war for market share, which is basically a land war, and a war for margin, which is essentially a war of attrition. How this is best viewed is in incentives, which are starting to bleed away as automakers deal with tariff impacts. Oh, right, there’s also a trade war at the center of all this, and it’s hitting Japanese automakers hard.
One war that some automakers will be happy to win is the War Against the Environment, though there’s at least one automaker getting hit by friendly fire.
So, you’ve been warned; this is what’s coming today. Either you can run away, or you can be impressed by my huge tracts of… text.
Automakers Sent A Letter To The Justice Department That Sparked A ‘Holy War’
“I’ll bite your legs off!”
You have to give credit to a reporter who nails a quote that makes the whole story. That reporter is not me, but Molly Boigon of Automotive News, who got this quote about a battle brewing between the dealers and the automakers:
“If there is such thing as a holy war in the franchise world, it’s a holy war,” said Don Hall, CEO of the Virginia Automobile Dealers Association. The alliance’s letter is “an affront to this industry.”
Oh, that’s good. Run it right into my veins.
What are we talking about here? What is this letter? I’ll let Automotive News explain:
The Alliance for Automotive Innovation has asked the U.S. Department of Justice to examine whether state franchise laws restrict competition and harm consumers, provoking a battle with the National Automobile Dealers Association in an auto industry clash of the titans.
The alliance’s May 27 letter, addressed to the government’s new Anticompetitive Regulations Task Force, specifically asks the Justice Department to examine state laws governing vehicle warranty service and state laws that limit establishing franchised new-vehicle dealerships in certain areas.
NADA views the alliance’s actions as “a direct attack to the franchise system,” the group told its board and its Automotive Trade Association Executives in a July 14 email obtained by Automotive News. The Automotive Trade Association Executives represent more than 100 state and metropolitan franchised new-car dealer associations in the U.S. and Canada.
This White House is doing things, and besides defunding MotorWeek and Sesame Street, it’s set up an Anticompetitive Regulations Task Force that theoretically “advocates for the elimination of anticompetitive state and federal laws and regulations that undermine free market competition and harm consumers, workers, and businesses.”
The Alliance for Automotive Innovation is the new name of the automotive lobbying group that represents most automakers and a big chunk of the Tier 1 suppliers as well. That group sent a letter to the DOJ asking, hey, maybe look at state franchise laws, which govern how vehicles can be sold in various markets.
Does this have to do with direct sales to consumers? Not quite. One of the biggest issues the Alliance highlighted, according to Automotive News, was that existing dealers can oppose new dealerships within a certain distance called the “relevant market area,” though there’s no consistent standard on how big that area can be. The Alliance contends this hurts competition at the expense of consumers.
That’s not the biggest issue, though. The biggest issue is over warranty repairs. We’ve covered this before, but the Alliance doesn’t love that dealerships basically have agreed-upon hourly charges for warranty repairs given that, because of these laws, automakers have no choice but to pay the dealerships to do the service — dealers “effectively have a monopoly,” per Automotive News’ quote of the alliance’s letter. While this isn’t uncommon, the dynamic is that the automaker is the one providing the warranty, yet, at the same time, it can’t choose how that warranty is fulfilled. Dealers make a lot of money from warranty repairs and so are loath to part with that part of the business.
How the Task Force might change state laws, other than suing, is a little unclear at the moment. Dealers have taken this as yet another attack, and now the Alliance seems to be walking it back a bit, saying that it does “support the dealership franchise model. Period. Full stop.”
I guess we’ll call it a draw!
Incentives Are Going Down As Automakers Decide To Retreat To Margins Over Market Share
When danger reared its ugly head, he bravely turned his tail and fled.
If you’re interested in the real nitty gritty of the automotive world from a dealer’s perspective, I recommend reading the CCar Dealership Guy Newsletter, which talks today about incentives, which are going away. As CDG points out, incentives rose pre-tariff to $2,900-per-unit in Q1, only to drop to $2,700-per-unit last quarter.
Even worse for consumers, VW, Land Rover, Volvo, BMW, and the Stellantis brands all dropped incentives by large margins as they tried to absorb rising costs related to tariffs. Automakers are trying to preserve profits and not necessarily gain new customers. Obviously, if everyone is dropping incentives, then there’s a cartel effect like the one we saw during the pandemic (sometimes called Seller’s Inflation).
Not everyone is there, yet, as pointed out in the newsletter:
But here’s the problem, it’s become a game of chicken.
“Automakers likely still feel they are in a war for market share, no one wants to blink first,” Cox Automotive’s executive analyst Erin Keating told me.
OEMs want to protect margins while dealers manage the affordability gap. But inventory doesn’t lie.
“We’ve never been in a history that sits by and says, let’s just let it age,” Keating said. “If sales continue to plateau, I think we’ll see incentives come back.”
CDG contends that this isn’t going to work long term, and by that, Q4 the market should be friendly again to buyers as cars pile up on dealership lots, causing automakers to retreat from margin and get back into the business of selling more cars. Why? Dealers have to play, via floorplan loans, for a car every month it sits on the floor. Eventually, you just start losing money as well as customers. Ford is the real outlier here, as it continues to push for share.
One rabbit stew coming right up!
Japanese Automakers Are Caught In A Trade War That Makes No Sense To Them
You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you.
Did anyone vote for this specific outcome? Were people specifically mad at, like, Toyota (the brand for which most Americans are loyal), and wanted Japan to be punished? I have talked at length already about the strangeness of President Trump’s fixation with Japan, but it’s the reality of the moment, and Japan’s automakers will have to face it.
How are automakers doing this? For the moment, Japanese companies are absorbing price impacts, but that also can’t last forever, as Nikkei Asia points out:
Japanese carmakers have been resorting to steeper price cuts in the U.S. to retain market share, said Marcel Thieliant, head of Asia-Pacific at Capital Economics.
While some of the disparity in value and volume “simply reflects the strengthening of the yen as US-bound exports are typically invoiced in dollars,” Thieliant wrote in a note, “most of it is due to price cuts, with carmakers seemingly absorbing nearly all of the 25% US tariff imposed by Trump in April in their margins.”
Despite being the most important U.S. ally in Asia, Japan has made little progress in persuading Washington to lower its tariffs. Trump has been determined to narrow the U.S. trade deficit with Japan, which stood at $68.5 billion in 2024, and therefore refused to scrap the new tariffs on Japanese autos.
As the negotiations drag on, Japanese carmakers are starting to raise prices in the U.S. and preparing to boost American production, as absorbing increased costs from the tariffs seem to have reached their limit.
What happens next is a little up in the air while everyone waits for the outcome of Japan’s upcoming elections. As we all know, executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not some farcical aquatic ceremony.
President Trump’s War On The Environment Takes A Surprising Turn
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Yes, it’s not from Holy Grail but, instead, Flying Circus. I bet you didn’t expect that. Just like no one expected…the president to cut off the subsidies from Elon Musk’s company. There was always the threat that President Trump would nix the EV tax credit, which happened. But by retroactively removing penalties for violating CAFE standards and killing California’s Clean Air Act Waiver, Elon Musk may have just lost a key source of income.
The rub here is that automakers, once encouraged to pursue a green future with electric cars through regulations, are retreating to meet market demand for trucks, which automakers can can now build without fear of penalty, as the Trump administration has pretty much scrubbed CAFE standards. While automakers generally lobbied to keep the EV tax credits, the removal of CAFE penalties provides a lot of upside to companies like GM and Stellantis.
That is what’s happening, according to Reuters, and even better, it’s retroactive for three years.
The tax and budget bill approved by Trump ends penalties for not meeting Corporate Average Fuel Economy rules under a 1975 energy law.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a letter to automakers seen by Reuters it is working on its reconsideration of fuel economy rules. The decision is one of a number made by Washington to make it easier for automakers to build gasoline-powered vehicles and to make electric vehicle sales more costly.
Last year, Chrysler parent Stellantis paid $190.7 million in civil penalties for failing to meet U.S. fuel economy requirements for 2019 and 2020 after paying nearly $400 million for penalties from 2016 through 2019. General Motors previously paid $128.2 million in penalties for 2016 and 2017.
Tesla doesn’t make any gas-powered vehicles, so this doesn’t help it at all. What Tesla does make is about $2.8 billion globally from regulatory credits earned by offsetting these kinds of penalties. Under this new system, it’s not clear how much money Tesla might make from credits in the United States. Additionally, there’s some talk in Europe about removing these credits from the automaker.
What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD
You had to know it was coming, right? It’s Monty Python with the “Lumberjack Song.”
The Big Question
Who is going to win this war? Automakers, dealers, or consumers? None of the above? All of the above?
Top photo: Monty Python
I just wanted to add “Help! Help! I’m being oppressed!”
/reading book on technofeudalism right now so this seemed appropriate
That’s a good book, assuming it’s the same book.
It’s the 2023 one by Yanis Varoufakis — it’s a little awkwardly written as a letter to his late father, but is pretty concise in its primer on both socialism and capitalism. Even though the author is firmly in the Marxist camp (and I’m not), I like to draw ideas from broad sources to at least figure out why people feel the way they do. People’s experience and backgrounds often trump objectivity in their political persuasions. And people our age grew up knowing nothing but capitalism, so I’m always happy to acknowledge my own bias. I at least respect his position as a senior Greek finance official during the Great Recession. That’ll harden your perspective a bit.
Yup, same.
*repressed. A subtle but important distinction (to keep in subservience or hardship vs. to subdue by force, per OED. The peasant in the movie uses the latter since he’s being directly manhandled).
Market share is virtually useless today, IMO. There are too many segments, and too much overlap, so obsessing over market share can be a losing battle. On top of that, you can game the market share stats with fleet sales, insane incentives, and other tricks.
Every single automaker should be focused first on margin, and then on volume.
That’s easy to say when you have a class-leading product, I guess. OTOH, you have the Mitsubishis and Chryslers and Nissans of the world, where incentives have been such a part of sales tactics for so long, people just expect it.
The whole system is broken, and now that the world no longer considers “vertical integration” to always be a bad thing, I think I’d support replacing dealer groups with corporate-owned shops. I’d at least like for them to try it, see how it goes. I can barely bring myself to even set foot in a new car dealer anymore, it’s like a flashback to being a little kid. The tactics have changed that little.
However, I have seen on CarGurus lately that a lot more new car dealers from other states are happy to ship me a car at no extra cost, undercutting all the local dealers. Not sure if it’s too good to be true (eg, “$3k dealer prep fee” or whatever) but it seems like a start…and definitely takes the work off of the consumer having to email 10 different places to get a decent price.
Sorry for not just editing my post, when I do that it turns into a single paragraph and unreadable. Not sure if it’s my browser or the site.
Thankfully in my recent experience, all it takes to get the local dealer to match that price is to show them a pricing sheet from a competing dealer for the exact model you want. I just bought a Pilot Trailsport at a discount from one of my local dealers and they even had to go trade for the color we wanted. My buddy just bought a Civic Type R for $500 off msrp after showing the other local dealer a pricing sheet on a new CTR from out of state. That local CTR had $5k ADM slapped on it too while it was sitting in the showroom.
Nicely done, a couple years ago I wrote off the Pilot TS sheerly because inventory was thin and they were selling at markups if you could find one. Now I see a few of them a day. Really nice choice, if our Odyssey were dying, that’d be the replacement.
Now I’m shopping the Civic Hybrid (not to replace the van!) and the local shops all list it for MSRP, but 1-2 states away they have them for $3k under with free delivery.
Who is going to win this war? Automakers, dealers, or consumers? None of the above? All of the above?
No one involved actually cares about the consumer, so I hope both sides lose.
If the current regime gave even a single fuck about the consumer they wouldn’t have effectively shut down the CFPB and rolled back it’s rulings.
So your answer is: Let them fight!
Yup, they can knock each other out.
And the consumer’s finishing move could be to simply stop buying for a while.
With ever increasing prices, high interest rates, and economic uncertainty, I can’t understand how people are still buying new vehicles.
Rooting for injuries.
The franchise dealership model in its current state should be as dead as a particular Norwegian Blue parrot. But right now it’s slung over the shoulder of the AAI being carried to the corpse cart while screaming that it’s “not dead yet! “.
Here’s hoping.
Malaise Era – Take two
At this point I suspect *most* automakers are going to keep things moving forward like they did last time he rolled back EPA requirements in his first term. GM and Ford may be happy to keep selling v6s and v8s without a penalty, but they aren’t going to stop developing EVs and hybrids entirely because the market is still shifting that way (and they’ll get caught with their pants down in a couple years like they did in the 70s. Chrysler, well, they will probably go back to their “Hemi all the things” strategy which could at least keep them afloat for a couple more years.
The catch is that Trump may well impose insane penalties on companies that continue to develop vehicles that don’t run on dinosaur juice. Or, who knows with Trump, even coal.
Ocassional reminder that we now live in a tarted-up kingdom.
And here’s your occasional reminder that the people who get harmed by said kingdom the most are the ones who keep sprinting and falling over each other to vote for it.
Who’s going to win? E-bikers who fly down the bike path at 30mph.
Until they crash and crack their melons open or their bike batteries burn down their houses.
Trifles, my friend, trifles.
The rich will win and the poor will lose. Next question.
Same as it ever was except for a few revolutions here and there.
The system functioning just as it was designed.
Like Dennis Moore, they steal from the poor and give to the rich… Stupid bitch!
The rich dealership magnates or the rich automaker executives?
The biggest loser is us not-1%-wealthy people. Now the carmakers selling cars here have zero incentive to build cheaper or less polluting vehicles. The super rich can hold virtual board meetings from their yachts while dictating us peons return to the office. That means we get stuck breathing in all that air pollution from sitting in traffic. And at more risk from accidents from the increased numbers of trucks with their poorer visibility. This timeline sucks.
I really do get a macabre kick out of the fact that the US Government and American automotive manufacturers’ plan is literally just “MOAR TRUCKS! If you don’t like it then DIE!” forever and always.
“wait, but what if the free market choses more fuel efficient vehicles anyway?”
“ummmmm, tariff on Japan?”
“We need to rig the market so the only thing you have the freedom to choose is which $70,000 body on frame truck you get to take out a mortgage to own”
Pretty much. My job sent is home 2 weeks ago and again next week because of supposed market doing bad (when it was really more due to needed to replace engines in a bunch of sold vehicles before the buyers would take ownership.) When I get back to work next week I have to completely undo my entire testing setup in the truck I am testing in because they need to put lipstick on the greased pig for an executive ride and drive. Gotta love that when you get so high up on the totem pole everyone else has to bow down to you and completely stop work.
There should be a trend of coal-rolling private country clubs during business hours.
Who says anyone is gonna’ win?
Anybody else hearing Drive-By Truckers “The Great Car Dealer War” while reading this?
I’ll quote Dalton from the original Roadhouse: Nobody ever wins a fight.
It’s only a matter of who loses the least. We’ll all lose quite a bit in the short term, but hopefully there will be some movement against the dealership tyranny. Back in the day that model sort of made sense, but given modern tech and delivery options, it’s now just a means of gouging customers.
To paraphrase Dalton, “It’d only get worse, but don’t assume it’d get better.”
So we have a volatile economy that’s essentially a couple of tweets away from entering a full blown recession, inflation that’s no longer running rampant but can be described as persistent, stagnant wages for everyone other than the 1%, average car payments that might as well be mortgages, and worsening climate change that’s killing more people every year. None of that is good!
…and our big beautiful American car plan is to kick out everyone that makes efficient cars, and build even more big, heavy, dangerous, polluting trucks that people need to take out 10 year loans to be able to afford because of course it is…and we’re doing all of this while skipping on the edge of economic catastrophe and trying to fire the chair of the federal reserve so LINE GOES DOWN?
What could possibly go wrong? *bleeding profusely out of both arm stubs* it’s just a flesh wound!
The 1970s are BACK, baby! Just the worst parts.
Right? Sheesh. At least back then the sex, drugs, and rock n roll were omnipresent. These days we’ve got a bunch of celibacy loving, drug and fun hating lunatics. Even the youths don’t want to have sex! And rock is dead too!
I graduated HS in ’72. Yes there was good sex, drugs and rock & roll… in porn, movies and song, not in any place attainable by mere young mortals. And rock radio was busy trying to push Quadriophonic Sound by playing “Wildfire” on super heavy rotation.
I once had breakfast with Michael Martin Murphy. He was as laid back as his song.
You might have been a little too young or in the wrong part of the country. Talk to people who graduated (in the Northeast & California) from maybe 1975 to 1983 about their experiences. By the mid 1980s the sex was way down because of the herpes and then AIDs scares, but for the decade before things were wild. Coke supplanted Pot in the late 1970s – for those that could afford it, but pot is easy to grow in the backyard – so (low grade) pot was readily available. Rock was awesome throughout – although you needed to have time to stand in line to get your tickets.
Spent the ’80’s in southern FLA. Everything mentioned was reversed. The local economy refused to participate in the national economic downturn. Fiat 124 Spyders with broken timing belts were $75 a pop. It was a wonderful moment and place in time.
*depressed and jealous elder millennial noises*
Dammit, I don’t want to wear my older cousin’s polyester hand-me-downs again!
I wish the war was more aggressive in the minvan market. Besides Chrysler specifically with the plug in Pacifica (awesome car, but I don’t want to risk the reliability), no one else seems to be really doing much in terms of pricing.
I’m still trying to come to terms with the fact that a minivan is going to be the most expensive car I’ve ever bought……
Agreed. I have a 2013 Sienna that I would love to replace with a new one, but when they are priced as high as an entry Supra, that just does not work for me. And our old one works fine still, so there’s no need to upgrade, I just want to get 35mpg instead of 19, but when the cheapest one I have seen in a 50 mile radius was still over $50k, I am not remotely interested.
Out 2013 is leaking oil via the timing cover. Engine out job to fix. But, oil is cheap at Costco so….
My wife still wants to think about a new car, but I think.used is going to be the play.
Really? Interesting. Ours has 150k on it now and has never given me a single problem. We rebuilt the suspension last summer, but that’s the only unexpected issue we’ve ever had, and it still doesn’t leak or burn a drop of oil. Mechanically it still feels brand new. The interior is showing it’s age, and the exterior is trashed, but it’ll be sticking around a long time still I’m sure.
Yep, and it is a known issue. We have the head gasket seepage problem as well — stopped or slowed AFAIK with Bars Leaks.
Ours is getting rough on the outside despite the lowish (under 170K kms) mileage. The interior would look great if we didn ‘t constantly have kids riding in it.
Huh. I’m not familiar with either of those issues, and yeah we have a lot more miles on ours. Yeah, the interior would clean up nicely, but it’s really just not worth it with the kids that manage to trash it completely in like 15 minutes.
“There are two wars going on simultaneously. There’s a war for market share, which is basically a land war, and a war for margin, which is essentially a war of attrition. How this is best viewed is in incentives, which are starting to bleed away as automakers deal with tariff impacts. Oh, right, there’s also a trade war at the center of all this, and it’s hitting Japanese automakers hard.”
You’ve fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia! What’s next? Going in against a Sicilian, when death is on the line?
Invading Russia in winter?!
TBF both Napoleon and Hitler invaded Russia in the height of summer. Their mistake was not wrapping things up before winter and the bad luck of very bad weather.
They both expect Russia to collapse – at the peak of Barbarossa Germany only held 9% of Russian territory. It’s vast. At least in the time of the Tsar when the sun was setting on the western end of Russia it was rising in the east.
Great username!
Russia had a great strategy – they sat back and let the Germans roll right in and stretch their supply lines, then bogging them down when it was too late to make any type of hasty retreat.
It’s hard not to admire the sacrifice USSR made in defeating Hitler, regardless of what one thinks of them otherwise.
Its not like they had much choice. Hitler made it very clear his goal was to enslave or kill all Slavs, especially communists and give that land to the SS to lord over with non SS Germans to be underclass workers but above the remaining slavs.
True but still no one suffered nearly as much as the Soviet Union during the war… and this came from someone whose family lived under Japanese occupation on the Pacific side of things.
no one suffered nearly as much as the Soviet Union during the war
– Poland enters the chat
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351638/second-world-war-share-total-population-loss/
(maybe where your family lived under Japanese occupation too if it was part of the South Seas Mandate)
And they had good reason too, after all little Finland had just done surprisingly well fighting Russia in a winter war. Unfortunately for Germany the weather in 1941 and ’42 was bad and the Russians managed to get their shit together.
IIRC Germany only planned to go to the Ural and Caucasus mountains. Japan had its eyes on the east.
That’s why the game is called “Risk”.
Is it wrong of me to hope to that franchise model just might be the Sicilian in this example?
AHAHAHAHA, AHAHA-*schlumps to ground*
Now we see the violence inherent in the dealership model! Help! Help! I’m being repressed!
Well I didn’t vote for it!
Real power comes from a mandate from the masses, not some farcical aquatic ceremony.
NADA views the alliance’s actions as “a direct attack to the franchise system,”
Because it is, as the Franchised Dealers are a horrible and outdated system that literally no one in the country likes, unless they own a dealership themselves.
Pretty sure the vast majority of us, would just like a simple system to purchase vehicles. Go to the manufacturer’s website. Pick the model and trim (Which has a set price), pick any options (Which all have set prices), review your order, click Buy, and wait for it to show up.
Then, everyone can buy the exact same car with the exact same options for the exact same price. You don’t have to spends days or weeks searching a 200 mile radius for that one car you want, at a not completely ripping you off, price.
So much this. I almost always know what car I want, and spend 90% of the time finding the right car, making the decision is easy, then it’s figuring out how to get what I want without getting ripped off. Admittedly, I always buy used, but man if I could just order online and have it delivered to my door, without the scummy finance bros trying to upsell everything by buying new, I would very likely start buying new.
I’ve done a lot of work in the vicinity of those dealer Finance bros, and boy howdy, not sure scummy comes anywhere near describing them. I despise the franchise FI department as a model and very nearly all participants.
You’re not wrong, but this is a family show. I do apologize to all the scummy people who I insulted by lumping them in with the FI guys, because they are at least 8 steps lower on the ladder than scummy.
Apologize to all scum! Even the algae!!
Resellers can fit into this mix too. Some people don’t want it to just show up. They want to drive one, have a human show them how it works etc. Plus, if makers can go direct to consumer, that just adds overhead for them. I don’t think all makers want to be on the hook for handling every single consumer transaction.
I agree that the dealership business model is horrid, but at this time, when automakers are facing plenty of other challenges, do they want to incur all of the expenses to set up sales and service centers all over the country? I suspect they do not.
If the elimination of the dealership model was to happen, I suspect manufacturers would contract with existing dealerships (especially the biggies like Autonation, Penske, etc.) to operate their service and distribution centers, but with the manufactuers’ side of the contracts giving them much more control over day-to-day operations.
Now that it’s Autopian canon, I can wear my “Killer Rabbit Hot Sauce” T-shirt to Autopian Events. “You’ll soil your armor”
“Japanese Automakers AreEveryone Is Caught In A Trade War That Makes No Sense To Them”I fixed your title.
FIFY
I gave it some long hard thought. The trade war makes perfect sense if you are the 1% and DGAF about everyone else.
It’s quite brilliant actually. Many (even here) openly advocate for higher tariff though the tax burden fall squarely on the masses. It literally is the most regressive form of taxation imaginable.
Tax cuts don’t pay for themselves but you can convince the 99% to pay for it.
Really? I expected it as soon as the Ketamine Cowboy started tiffing with the Mangerine.
Also, I feel like the Lumberjack Song counts as a Canadian Heritage minute. So thanks for that!
I also feel like Canada could win, especially if we start accepting Euro crash standards.
Consumers?
Hahahaha
Oh, you were serious? Let me laugh harder.
HAHAHAHAHA
Rich Corinthian Leather will be the only winner on this, everyone else gets screwed somehow. My job is “optimizing” manufacturing footprint because of tariffs, they dont use the language of closing plants and laying off people.
Sounds better than “rightsizing”, I guess.
No, it doesn’t. It’s the same BS, different wrapper.
E’s not pinin’! ‘E’s passed on! This car is no more! He has ceased to be! ‘E’s expired and gone to meet ‘is maker! ‘E’s a stiff! Bereft of life, ‘e rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed ‘im to the shorrom floor ‘e’d be pushing up the daisies! ‘Is metabolic processes are now ‘istory! ‘E’s off the twig! ‘E’s kicked the bucket, ‘e’s shuffled off ‘is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-CAR!!
Salesman: “So does that mean you’d prefer to lease?”
Well that’s bleak, even with the Monty Python references. The winner will probably be Europeans, Mexicans, Canadians, who can all buy whatever car they want and wean themselves off any reliance on US goods.
Who will all fall deeper into the China trap. Not a good outcome either.
Nope, but hopefully the bills come due for China at some point.
Fuck the dealership system. They have bribed their way to a monopoly and are doing their hardest to stop it. Here in Utah, you can’t even have a dealership open on Sunday because the mormon dealers whine around how unfair it is. The repubs here just love making themselves into victims CONSTANTLY even though they control the whole state. Burn the whole system to the ground and rebuild it.
Just like tax preparation companies and how we have to file taxes. Just like pay to play health care.
Just pull your health up by your boostraps.
Is there anything in this capitalist hellscape that ISN’T designed to separate us from every last cent?
Pretty sure that’s the definition of “Capitalism”.